learning 2 May 2008
So, here are a few things I have learned, heard or might like to believe from my week of travel.
Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn because there are over 20 tenses…I can’t believe a person could have so many intentions let alone need that many tenses to go with them.
A Dublin taxi driver, who lived in Barcelona for ages, told me that the Spanish think you are being sarcastic if you say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ to them. (I stress that I heard that from a TAXI man and as we know they THINK they know everything but a lot of the time do not)
Quick point about the above point – my sis in law and brother have both taxied and we have many nice taxi people friends in Galway so I am now a dead woman.
As I have told you, Richard chose to learn Russian for many reasons but a lot of it was to do with history. When I asked him more the other day, he told me that 1 in 7 people in Russia died in WW2 – mind boggling.
This morning he texted me from Stratford-Upon-Avon saying he was having green tea and studying his Russian then added ‘tinkin ken=toast’ and I thought it was one of my two words for the day (like to add to my own Russian vocabulary daily) so I spent an hour thinking the Russian for toast was ‘tink ken’ which seemed unnecessarily elaborate, but that’s language for you. Then, as I whizzed through London in a lovely car to go record some dinner party scenes for Bremner Bird and Fortune, I copped that he meant that Ken Livingstone was in trouble in the mayoral election!
The Russian for toast is ‘toast’…
